Historically, embossers have been successfully used to imprint a pattern into a material by applying a force, by means of a press or hammer, to a die held against the material, with the material resting on an anvil. However, embossers have been primarily limited to using homogeneous materials, such as metal, because these materials respond almost uniformly through the thickness and across the span of the material. A relatively inexpensive material that has not found much application with embossers is wood. Because wood forms under widely varying climatic conditions, wood is a non-uniform, almost heterogeneous, material. That is, wood, even within a single piece, is not uniform in density. It is this very non-uniformity that gives many woods a beauty that is highly prized. Therefore, one part of a wood workpiece may be considerably more dense than another part. Thus, classic wood forming techniques include cutting, planing, drilling, burning, and routing. Each of these methods achieves the desired effect by removing some portion of the wood. In embossing, however, no material is removed; rather it is reshaped using pressure (force) and, in some instances, heat.
For many commercial products, it would be highly desirable to combine the cost, availability, and beauty of wood with the ease of applying a design by embossing. However, because of the non-uniform density problem, attempting to emboss wood often causes the embossing die to cant with respect to a normal to the face of the work piece when the die encounters a very dense portion of wood. The result is a distorted product. In general, the problem is greater as the area of the workpiece increases. Additionally, the presses capable of performing embossing of this nature are quite large and may weigh up to 10 tons. To be economically productive these machines require multiple dies to form multiple pieces in a single pressing, because the function rate for the presses is quite slow. Therefore, tooling costs are significantly increased.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a single die, wood embosser of a reasonable size that significantly limits the amount of cant that is allowed of the hammer and the die as force is transmitted to the wood. The embosser should also permit rapid processing of one workpiece at a time.